Asher2012.p2.t3 Post Modern Synthesis

Reginald Pollack, an artist with a very unusual style, owed his creativity to the whirlwind manner in which his mind operated. Disturbed by the ghastly images he saw during World War II in the Aleutians, and by his mental illness, Pollack used art as a way to express himself, and found great success in this field. During his life he would undergo a sort of self psychotherapy that fed into his brilliance. He found what Sigmund Freud called his Id, his innermost animalistic self; the self haunted by alcoholism, and put it into art. Sigmund Freud one of the great minds in the fields of psychology, and the founder of psychoanalysis described the humans state of being as existing in one of three levels. The Ego, the Superego, and the Id, were the levels of existence for the human mind, and the Id is what we try to suppress most; the Id is the part of our mind that is animalistic, pleasure seeking, and all around living in a state of incongruity with societies demands. Freud felt that exploring a person’s mental state lied in exploring the parts of the human mind, and that is just what Pollack did with his art. Through some of his most famous paintings, “Guardian’s of the Secret”, “The She Wolf” and “Peace March”, Pollack creates a most surreal image of the world, one that is dominated by a splattering of colors, unusual lines, and odd scenes. This image is his way of describing his Id, the way he sees the world in a most basic and primal way. The images he sees evoke many different emotions within him, and he expresses the cacophony of ideas with a cacophony of colors and abstract images.
Andy Warhol, perhaps one of the most famous artists of this era, went through many of the same emotions. He saw what society perceived to be perfect (at least superficially); celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe were major figures in the public eye, and Warhol was equally fascinated by not only the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but by the art that is present in the everyday life of an American. He would analyze his world, much as Sigmund Freud would, by analyzing what emotions where evoked in the deepest parts of his mind. By painting Marilyn Monroe in many different colors, he is expressing the many different emotions that the images of Hollywood in general would stir in the deepest part of his mind. Sigmund Freud’s idea of looking deep into the mind allowed both of these artists to fully express every part of themselves and reveal what was going on in the most primal level of their being.

August Mawn, Tom Allen, Zachary Gershman, Daniel Pon